1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to information storage and management system. More particularly, the present invention pertains to a method, a system, and an apparatus for storing, retrieving, and sharing contact information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Communication, or telecommunication, is one of the most important activities of people living in modern societies. There are various modes of communications between two or more parties: Telephones, postal mails, emails, instant messaging, etc. In order to establish a communication channel, one party should typically initiate communication, and the first step in doing so is finding the contact information of the desired party or parties, such as a telephone number, postal address, email address, instant messaging ID, etc., depending on the communication mode.
Traditionally, contact information has been exchanged (or, otherwise disseminated or uncovered) in various ways. One method involves the direct contact of the relevant parties. For example, one person can give the other person his or her phone number in a face-to-face meeting. Certain media may be used such as business cards. One mode of communication may be used to exchange other types of contact information. For example, person A may send to person B his telephone number through an email. Another prevalent method of discovering contact information involves a third party. For example, person A can get the contact information of person B through person C. More established methods include phone directories, organizational address books, etc. These methods have certain limitations. For example, the first method of exchanging contact information mentioned above can be utilized only in a limited context by its very nature. It also requires a certain amount of effort from each participant, for instance, to maintain and update the contact information. Furthermore, the effort is typically duplicated among many people. (For example, if one person's contact information changes, all people who have his or her contact information need to update it.) The second method of uncovering contact information mentioned above is probably more “scalable”. However, it also requires certain amount of predisposed information to be able to retrieve the contact information. For example, one needs to know the name of the desired party in order to find the party's phone number (e.g., using white pages, etc.). Furthermore, it is not easy to retrieve the “optimal” (or, most relevant) information in the current design of the third-party based contact information storage, retrieval, and management systems. For example, if one wishes to find a “best” dentist in his or her area (in a certain subjective sense), yellow pages is not the best source of such information. Typically, people ask other people (e.g., friends, families, coworkers, other professionals such as doctors, etc.) for “referrals”.
Many people maintain certain contact information (such as those frequently used, those of friends, those of business contacts, etc.), for example, in a personal address book, Rolodex, etc., or, by simply collecting business cards. Electronic personal information management (PIM) systems have also been widely used. For example, many mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) include PIM functionalities. Many people also manage their business and/or personal contact list on their personal computers, or on Web servers, etc. As stated earlier, this type of information management system involves redundant effort among many users and it incurs substantial amount of extra cost (to the system and the group of participants as a whole) due to duplicated efforts.